I doubt there is any country so closely associated with food as France. Even the national dress of stripy top and beret contains an obligatory string of onions round the neck and ceremonial baguette. Haut cuisine, cordon bleu, le petit déjeuner: phrases known to every one of us in the cold grey North as appellations of culinary excellence. You might be forgiven if you picture the French as decadent louche alcoholics taking bites alternately from a block of foie gras and a packet of butter, measuring the spirals to discover the most succulent gastropods, and donating spare centimes to the Société Pour la Fourniture de Fauteuils Roulants Pour les Grenouilles Sans Jambes. Of course, all this is true, but the relationship the French, and by extension inhabitants of France, have with food is far more complex and nuanced. I take it upon myself, therefore, as a dedicated follower of the late great Keith Floyd, to explain to you, my fellow gastronauts, a day in my life through the medium of food. Just wait a minute whilst I pour myself a drink.

Still there? D’Accord, allons-y! I awoke, as is the custom of so many foreigners exposed to both the goodness and the cheapness of French wine, with something of a minor hangover. Dispelling it with an invigorating shower, I grabbed a velib and cycled down to the shops. (I should perhaps point out that I did in fact take the time to put some clothes on first, but this is by no means compulsory on a Saturday morning in France.) Place Maubert plays host to a market every Saturday morning. Picture long queues of elderly ladies equipped with granny-trollies (so much the fashion in Paris that you may even see them sported by certain chic young men.) They eye the various fish at one stall which are so fresh that they eye the old ladies back. “Look at that old trout!” said one to the other.

Cheese there is aplenty, meat, clothing, and a panoply of vegetables. I must mention at this point an argument I had with a friend of mine who claimed the French have an abundance of different sorts of potatoes. This, in my limited experience, is untrue. Even in the market I have counted no more than two different varieties: big and small. When you need a spud, go to Tesco. Otherwise French markets will serve you very well.

The difficulty is that although there is unarguably a great deal of delectable and perfectly formed foodstuffs on offer at these markets, they do cost a bit more than the regular super Marché, which is why I was forced, as always, to go to Franprix.

Franprix, for those of you who are unaware, is a French supermarket. It’s very much the Asda of the breed, Monoprix is a bit more upmarket like a Sainsbury’s or high end Tesco. Carrefour is like the Co-operative. There is no analogous supermarket to Waitrose because the French enjoy the exercise of walking from one tiny little product-specific store to another and you cant tell their social class because all of their first names are pretentious.

So I did a little frugal shopping, remembering the hilarious pantomime the French enjoy playing at the till. It goes something like this:

Checkout person: Good day my sir!

Me: Good day my sir!

CP: Do you need a bag?

Me: It is not necessary, I have a bag here!

CP: Beeps the stuff as usual: Will that be all?

Me: Yes, that is all!

CP: So, that is ten Euro sixty-ten-seven!

Me: I hand over the cash, which has to be in exact change like on Lothian buses or they wont sell you anything. I am still uncertain what is the best thing to say at this point in the transaction , so I say: Thank you

CP: Thank you, my sir, and good day!

Me: Good day and good bye!

There is one thing, however, that I do not stint on and that is bread. The cost of a baguette, even out a posh boulangerie, is roughly the same everywhere. I go to Eric Kaiser, which is in fact a sort of chain in Paris, but they do a good thick crunchy crust and their baguette has a rustic rough crumb to it. Sorry, I’m going to have to have a drink now to get over the outrageous levels of pretension in what I’ve just written.

Alors, they do a good baguette. So does most of France. No preservatives, additives or what have you, just flour, yeast, water, and if you get them fresh out the oven there is nothing finer. I have a friend who, when she lived in Paris, used to caress baguettes as though she were rocking a new born infant to sleep. It rather ruined the image when she bit their heads off. Today I was in luck for on impulse I ordered not only my customary baguette but a pain au chocolat. It had come straight out the oven. My god. An ecstasy of flaky patisserie and chocolate, my heart melted like its gooey center.

“I’ve told you before, much more of your cheek and I’m sending you to Tesco!”

But we have this stuff, don’t we? You can buy it in Tesco! If you’re really posh you can get a croissant that’s endorsed by Raymond Blanc. No. That stuff isn’t bread, its crusty cotton wool. A croissant that’s been in a plastic box for more than one day? Unnatural! Inedible! And you can say its all very well for me, living in Paris, to look down my nose at UK food, but my only response is: “get to France.”

The French call these “les petit haricot dans une sauce de tomate” – the pretentious fucks…

And I don’t look down my nose at all. For, on returning to my single room apartment, what emerged from the Franprix bag, but a tin of Heinz beans (extortionately priced and found in the exotic foods section.) I warmed these beans on my little electric hob, before eating them, greedily out the pan with hunks of ripped off baguette, longing for my native Albia.

At this point you may be imagining I am not the sort of person you would like to be giving you tips on French food. You’d much rather I were some fat old sage called Franc explaining the best way to dig up truffles so that they retain their flavour (you do it with your elbows.) But I defy anyone to say there is not something immensely satisfying about eating something from the motherland.

Fear not, for after a lazy mid day trawl through my record collection and after I’d set the washing machine to make my clothing marginally less offensive (nasally, if not sartorially)  my friend Lauren arrived with some brie.

These are NOT COOKIES!

Lauren, being American, is evidently far better at Frenchness than I am. Brie, baguette and grapefruit juice was the order of the afternoon, and my god was she mortified when I produced a packet of ginger-nuts and referred to them as biscuits. But this is supposed to be about the French, not American, relationship with food.

On Lauren’s departure I did what you might imagine a stylish young man living in Paris might do: I read Moby Dick and drank a cup of Earl Grey. Before long all the laundry was done and it was getting on for dinner time. My room did not have a cooker when I arrived, but I have bought a double burner  and some pots and pans. Tonight I created a feast of rare steak, fried potatoes, broccoli and fried onions served with lashings of mustard and a leftover half bottle of red. Those among you who feared my non-French credentials may now rest at ease, this was a proper Francophile feast.

A footnote to this tale. As I drink another glass of rosé (it’s too cold for rosé, but I cant write and drink red wine) and munch yet another biscuit, I remember something I was told recently by an English woman who has lived a long time in France. It is the height of bad manners to cut your salad over here. Why? Who knows? But remember this: the French make a point of eating lettuce separate from everything else. It is incredibly boring on its own, but they make a fetish of it. I think it is some sort of masochistic penance for the sheer unhealthyness of the rest of their cuisine. After smearing butter over everything, being unnecessarily cruel to some geese and a baby cow, eating everything from the humble snail up and washing it down with a gallon of Vin de Pas Plus Cher, they look at the humble lettuce and say: we are sinners, we are gluttons, we are gormandising frog-licking fat bastards, but damn it, we will eat this lettuce on its own to declare our contrition before the rest of the world.

And they do it with nothing but a fork.

Kinky.